Hyperbole and a Half Read online

  Lawn mower: The lawn mower is surprisingly dangerous. Yes, it makes a fun little noise and it hasn’t actually done anything dangerous to you yet, but that’s because I lock you in the house before turning it on. Because I can see the future and I know what will happen if I let you play with the lawn mower.

  Vacuum: Despite being almost exactly the same thing as a lawn mower, the vacuum is not dangerous. Because unlike lawn mowers, vacuums are completely unable to turn your legs into hamburger meat. It’s weird that you’re so scared of the vacuum and so trusting of the lawn mower.

  Balloons: Remember when you and I took that road trip together and we stopped to go for a jog in Ritzville, Washington? And it was sort of fun because it was Halloween and there were all sorts of scary decorations to look at? And somehow, out of all the decorations we ran past—all the skeletons and giant spiders and flashing, screaming, motorized corpses—somehow a fucking balloon was the thing that made you yank me into the street as you fled in terror? Why did that happen? It was just floating there harmlessly, tied to a tree branch twenty feet away. I’m going to tell you a secret about balloons: they are mostly air. The scary thing is just an act.

  You’re really bad at making up games, dogs. From what I can tell, most of the things you consider fun involve ruining something or doing the same thing so many times in a row that everyone except you hates it.

  You seem to derive a great amount of joy from forcefully influencing the shape of things. Does this activity make you feel powerful? Is this how you satisfy your urge to make decisions? I’m sure it’s a great feeling to decide that the basket shouldn’t be a basket anymore and then actually be able to make that happen because the basket can’t stop you. But there are less destructive ways to make decisions.

  For example, here’s another game involving decisions:

  If you decide NOT to destroy objects, you are still making decisions! This might seem like a boring game, but I promise, if you just allow yourselves to be filled with wonder at how extremely the same everything stays, you’ll have fun. I know you very well. You are some of the most easily entertained creatures on the planet.

  This is probably your worst game, dogs. I hate this game. From what I can tell, there are two main variants of it: running into knees with your face, and running very close to knees while holding a huge stick in your big, dumb mouth.

  Nobody wants to play this game except you. Not even the old lady at the dog park. Not even children.

  Instead of playing this game, why not play “Run Around and See How Far Away from Knees I Can Be”?

  Lying on the floor and squeaking your toy for three hours in a row isn’t technically a game, but you seem to think it is, and that’s why you can’t have squeaky toys anymore.

  The important lesson here is to practice moderation in everything you do, including squeaking your squeaky toys. If you feel like doing something a lot, do it about a tenth of that amount instead.

  It’s unclear how you win or whether winning is even something you’re trying to do, but this game needs to stop.

  By now, I’m sure you can see that most of the things you want are stupid and most of the decisions you make are bad. Because of this, things aren’t going to go your way very often. You need to be comfortable with disappointment.

  If I have made a decision that is different from what you want, making high-pitched sounds at me will not change my mind.

  Neither will pawing at my legs.

  And finally, you cannot trick me. I know that T-shirts do not spontaneously fly apart into pieces. And I’m especially not going to believe that the T-shirt was destroyed by forces beyond your control when you’ve still got pieces of it stuck to your face.

  Pretending that I haven’t fed you immediately after I fed you isn’t going to work either.

  I know that you’ve already eaten because I am the one who gave the food to you. I remember doing it.

  Also, I’m never going to believe that all four of your legs stopped working at the exact moment I decided we should leave the dog park.

  You think you’re being so sneaky. I’ll admit that it’s embarrassing when I have to drag you to the car by your perfectly functional legs, past all the people who are judging me because none of their dogs become situationally quadriplegic and they’ve never experienced this so they don’t know what’s going on. But I do. I know exactly what’s going on. This same thing happens every single time I try to leave the dog park with you, and I’m not just going to stay there forever because other people might judge me for dragging you.

  But you thought that’s what would happen, didn’t you. You thought I would allow you to become some sort of dog-park-dwelling legless creature. Tell me, dog, what’s the point of living at the dog park if you’re just going to lie on the ground pretending to be paralyzed so you don’t have to go home? How would you find food? What would you do when it rained?

  This is why you need me.

  Okay, dogs, I’m sure you’ve got some questions after all of that. Fortunately, I know exactly what those questions are because you’re pretty transparent when you don’t understand something.

  Q: Should eat bees?

  A: No.

  Q: But . . . never bees?

  A: No. You should never eat bees.

  Q: Bees?

  A: No.

  Q: But how does it not eat bees?

  A: When you see a bee, you can avoid eating it by not putting it into your mouth. If you want to be extra sure that you will not eat bees, go somewhere where there are no bees until the urge to eat bees passes.

  Q: Why does bad decision?

  A: That’s a good question, dogs. Unfortunately, I don’t know why you make bad decisions. It’s just something you do.

  Q: How doors?

  A: If I told you how doors work, you’d be able to make too many decisions.

  Q: No.

  A: That isn’t a question.

  Q: Whole time was bag?

  A: Yes, in Chapter 1, Misconception #2, the object in the example was a bag the entire time. That wasn’t supposed to be a trick.

  Q: How does tricking?

  A: Before you can understand how tricking works, you need to understand the concept of subtlety.

  Q: Sorry.

  A: That is not a question, but I accept your apologies.

  At some point during my childhood, my mother made the mistake of taking me to see an orthodontist. It was discovered that I had a rogue tooth that was growing sideways.

  My mom and I were told that the tooth, if left unchecked, would completely ruin everything in my life and turn me into a horrible, horrible mutant.

  Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my natural life chained in a windowless shed to avoid traumatizing the other citizens, I was going to need surgery to remove the tooth.

  I was accepting of the idea until I found out that my surgery was scheduled on the same day as my friend’s birthday party. My surgery was in the morning and the birthday party wasn’t until the late afternoon, but my mom told me that I still probably wouldn’t be able to go because I’d need time to recover from my surgery. I asked her if I could go to the party if I was feeling okay. She said yes, but warned me that I probably wouldn’t be feeling well and to try not to get my hopes up.

  But it was too late. I knew that if I could trick my mom into believing that I was feeling okay after my surgery, she’d let me go to my friend’s birthday party. All I had to do was find a way to prove that I was completely recovered and ready to party. I began to gather very specific information about the kinds of things that would convince my mom that the surgery had absolutely no effect on me.

  I’m pretty sure my mom was just placating me so that I’d leave her alone, but somehow it was determined that the act of running across a park would indeed prove that I was recovered enough to attend the party. And I became completely fixated on that little ray of hope.

  I remember sitting in the operating room right before going under, coaching myself for
the ten thousandth time on my post-surgery plan: immediately after regaining even the slightest bit of consciousness, I was going to make my mom drive me to a park and I was going to run across it like a gazelle on steroids.

  And then she would let me go to the party.

  I must have done a really good job pretending to be okay even while I was still unconscious, because I was released well before the anesthetic wore off. My mom had to hold on to the back of my shirt to prevent me from falling over while we walked out of the hospital.

  I first started to regain consciousness while we were driving on the freeway. I didn’t know what was going on, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered that I needed to do something important.

  THE PARK!! I didn’t recall exactly why I needed to go to the park, but I had spent so much time drilling the concept into my head that even in my haze of near-unconsciousness, I knew that getting myself to a park was of utmost importance. I tried to communicate this to my mom, but the combination of facial numbness and extreme sedation caused me to be unable to form words properly.

  I yelled louder and more urgently, but my mom still couldn’t grasp what it was I wanted.

  It was at this point that I decided to open the car door and walk to the park by my damn self. The only problem was that instead of being stopped safely near a park, we were hurtling down I-90 at seventy miles per hour.

  Luckily I hadn’t had the presence of mind to unbuckle my seat belt, so instead of toppling to a bloody death, I merely hung out the side of the car and flailed around ineffectively.

  A little shaken up by the incident, my mom decided that it would probably be a good idea to pull off at the next exit and get some food in me. We found a fast-food restaurant and she led me inside.

  It was pretty crowded, but my mom didn’t want to get back in the car, so we found a table and she told me to wait while she stood in line to order our food.

  I sat contentedly at our table for a few minutes.

  But then I forgot what was happening and panicked.

  I had to find my mom. I had to tell her about the park. I tried to call for her, but I still couldn’t quite remember how to say words.

  I began stumbling around the restaurant, shouting the closest approximation to the word “mom” that I could come up with.

  My mom hadn’t yet figured out what I was trying to tell her, but she knew that I was yelling and stumbling into the other patrons and generally causing a scene, so she firmly told me to go back to my seat.

  I had remembered why I wanted to go to the park, so I obeyed my mom, thinking it would increase my chances of going to the park, thus increasing my chances of going to the party.

  When my mom returned to our table with our food, some version of the following conversation ensued:

  Me:

  Carn we go to the parp now?

  My mom:

  The park? Is that what you want?

  Me:

  Yes! The parp!

  My mom:

  No. Eat your food.

  Me:

  But moun—I can roun arcoss the porp. I can do it! I can go to the partney!

  My mom:

  No you can’t.

  Me:

  I can! I can! I CAN!!!

  My mom:

  Look at you. You can’t even walk. You can’t form a coherent sentence.

  Me:

  I CAN ROUN ARCOSS THE PARP!!! I CAN GO TO THE PARPY!!!

  My mom:

  You are not going to that party.

  Me:

  NO!! NO! NO MOUM! I CAN DO IT! I CAN GO!

  My mom:

  I said you can’t go to the party. Now eat your food.

  Me:

  MOOOOOOOUUUUUMM! WHY? WHY ARE YOU SO MEEEAAAAAAANNN?? WHY ARE YOU SO MEEEEEEEAAAAAAN TOOO MEEEEEE???

  My mom:

  Stop it.

  And then I started to cry big blubbery tears into my milkshake. It was at that point that my mom noticed all the people glaring at her and realized that, from an outside perspective, it appeared as though she was not only refusing to let her poor, mentally disabled daughter go to a park and/or a birthday party, but was also taunting her child about her disability.

  And that’s how I got to go to a birthday party while very heavily sedated.

  I like to believe that I would behave heroically in a disaster situation. I like to think this because it makes me feel good about myself. Conveniently, it is very unlikely that I will ever actually have to do anything to prove it. As long as I never encounter a disaster situation, I can keep believing I’m a hero indefinitely.

  Similarly, I can safely believe that I am the type of person who would donate a kidney to a loved one, give a million dollars to help save the animals, and survive a biological disaster due to my superior immune system and overwhelming specialness. As long as no one I love ever needs a kidney, I don’t become a millionaire, and my immune system is never put to the test by an antibiotic-resistant super flu, these are just things I can believe for free.

  It gets a bit trickier when I want to believe a thing about myself that actually requires me to do or think something. The things I am naturally inclined to do and think are not the same as the things I want to believe I would do and think. And I’m not even slightly realistic about what I want to be. I’m greedy and conceited, and I feel like I deserve to be impressed by myself.

  Unfortunately, I am not disciplined enough to maintain my behavior up to the standards of my ridiculously optimistic self-image, and I possess a great number of undesirable qualities, so it’s a daily struggle to prevent myself from ruining my own fantasy.

  But, against all odds, my gigantic ego continues to attempt greatness. And every day, it falls extremely short because, as powerful as it is, it is not even close to as powerful as what it’s up against.

  The most basic level of maintaining my self-image is just holding myself back from acting on my impulses. I am constantly bombarded by bizarre, nonsensical urges, and if I didn’t care about my identity, I would just do all of them.

  It would be fucking mayhem.

  Fortunately for other people, it would be insulting to my identity if I did these things, and this successfully scares me away from becoming a menace to myself and everyone.

  But I still have to know about the impulses.

  My ego hates getting out of its tower to deal with this shit. It’s got more important things to think about, like how virtuous and meaningful it is, and it has a hard time doing that when it is constantly distracted by the urge to do weird things to people. It wants to focus on being a good person, not just a barely not horrible one.

  Being a good person is a very important part of my identity, but being a genuinely good person is time-consuming and complicated. You don’t have to be a good person to feel like a good person, though. There’s a loophole I found where I don’t do good, helpful things, but I keep myself in a perpetual state of thinking I might.

  The fact that I think about doing nice things feels almost like actually doing them. I get to feel all the good feelings without any of the inconvenience. It’s disgusting how proud of myself I am for things I’ve never done.

  I also feel disproportionately good about myself whenever I’m presented with absurdly easy opportunities to do the right thing and then actually do it.

  I’m even proud about not being a dick in situations where it is theoretically possible to be a dick. I don’t feel especially inclined to be a dick in the first place, but I still feel proud that I somehow manage not to be. Based on how good this makes me feel about myself, I must subconsciously believe everyone else in the world is a horrible monster.

  It would disgust me to know I’m like this. When I look at myself, I don’t want to see the horrible, loophole-abusing monster that I am. I want to see a better person. Someone who is genuinely good and doesn’t need to resort to lies and manipulation. Because deep down, I feel like I’m better than this. Like I actually am a genuinely good person who has been invaded b
y someone else’s shitty thoughts.

  I am just the helpless vehicle for a lesser personality, forced to endure it against my will. I live in fear of it, hoping it won’t attack me and make me think things that I’m ashamed of.

  But it always does.

  I’m legitimately terrified that someday, someone I love is actually going to need a kidney. I’d like to say this fear stems from concern over the health of my loved ones, but it’s mostly because I don’t want to find out how I would react to someone needing one of my kidneys. I desperately want to believe I would seize the opportunity to help a loved one without a second thought for my own well-being, but I’m almost certain it wouldn’t play out like that. First of all, I really, really wouldn’t want to give away a kidney, and that would make me feel weird about myself. I’d feel selfish. Because I am.

  And if I was not a match, I’d be relieved, which would also put me face-to-face with some uncomfortable truths about myself. If I was a match, I would probably end up letting go of a kidney, but not before fully exhausting my mental arsenal of escape routes.